Once upon a time, the customer was someone familiar, someone who lived down the street and visited your store weekly. Stocking up on everything from garments to groceries, she would treasure your advice and put her faith in your expertise. On her way home from the store, she would be accompanied by the sound of tweeting birds, horse carriages and the kind hellos from fellow small towners.
Today, this romantic retail imagery is what we would call a good customer experience. Yet, with the ever-expanding scale of modern retail chains, delivering on all the parameters that make up a good, personal and unique experience is becoming more and more difficult.
The brick and mortar stores have long been victims in the battle of traditional vs online. So who's the knight in shining armour of today's retail landscape? What's going to help you slay the dragon in 2017?
Disrupt and conquer
Development is moving at light speed: Virtual Reality, Mobile, Internet Of Things, Face recognition techs - the potential is enormous and already an integral part of many retail chains.
However, with all the new technologies available today, there is still one essential thing to remember: We are human beings of flesh and blood who thrive on personal service and having a good time with friends and family.
So if we rewind and learn from the 'small town', one thing is proving to be one of the essential swords in the modern retail battle: The social factor. Recently, Forbes published an article on how brands can benefit from adapting a Research & Development approach to their retail concept:
"The company recognizes the need to breakdown silos and realize synergies across operations if it wants to test and successfully develop disruptive retail concepts."
In essence, succesfully disruptive retailers of today are asking themselves a number of important questions. What else can we do for the customers? How can we engage them in a different way? Where can we provide value in their lives?
Rebuild your castles
It's important to realise the difference between selling goods and selling good times. They're not the same, but they should be seamlessly connected. Creating synergy between the two of them is the optimal scenario, i.e. providing the good experience from an enjoyable purchase that was properly serviced by kind frontline staff. Agreed, this is a basic definition of good customer experience.
It's new that we are seeing a host of traditional brick and mortar retailers break down brick walls and rebuild their castles. By offering entertainment areas, nurseries, bike repairs, laundromats, barber shops etc. they go beyond what we would traditionally expect from them, which was for products to change hands.
Living happily ever after
One of the major challenges connected to reinventing your retail concept, as suggested above, is that measuring profitability becomes a slightly more difficult task. Because you may be attracting new and more customers now that you've made a popular place - but does that mean you'll be making money? We will leave that question hanging.
The second challenge is how to scale a chain's diverse, new-fangled and creative concept. One thing is certain though: Keeping track of concept compliance and campaign activities in traditional retail environment is already a comprehensive and difficult task to manage.
If only there were some kind of spell or magic wand that could help you do that, hmm......
...Book a personal presentation of Mobaro Retail here.
